Sunday, 22 April 2012

Happy Birthday New Queer Cinema: 20 Years On

According to B. Ruby Rich (who coined the term and
chronicled the movement) New Queer Cinema started with a party. There was cake
– to mark Derek Jarman’s 50th birthday, celebrated at the 1992 Sundance film
festival where Jarman proudly participated in the first all-queer panel to take
place at a mainstream festival. In celebration of the 20th anniversary (and in
a celebratory spirit), here are 20 candles NQC lit and keeps burning:

1:

The British are Queering! Derek Jarman’s place on the panel,
along with Black British director Isaac Julien, suggests the crucial role that
British cinema played in shaping NQC. Despite more than a decade of
Conservative rule, whose homophobic nadir was 1988’s Section 28 of the Local
Government Act banning local councils from funding any aspect of education that
“promoted” homosexuality, British independent queer cinema was in rude health.
Perhaps it was the influence of Section 28 shaping resistance – but it also can
be traced back to the late 1970s BFI production board that kickstarted the
careers of Jarman, Julien, Sally Potter, and Terence Davies, and to Channel 4,
which started broadcasting in 1982, and providing funding and – more
importantly, perhaps – an informed audience for queer cinema such as Rosebud,
which was commissioned in 1991 for the short film series OUT.

2:

Let’s Get Together!

Like the Sundance panel, Rosebud celebrates
the formation of queer community (as well as having fun with the idea of
homosexual conversion/infection that conservatives love to dread). Rich talks
about the importance of a defined community, produced by LGBT film festivals
internationally: Jarman, she says in her 2000 obituary for the movement “Queer
and Present Danger,” “pronounced himself finally able to connect with an
audience thanks to the critical mass of the new films and videos that burned a
clearing in the brush and attracted attention from the media as well as
audiences.”

3:Let’s Act Up! That community had been brought together not
only by the pioneering work of directors like Jarman, and photographers like
David Wojnarowicz (who died in 1992 of AIDS-related complications), but by
HIV/AIDS and activism in response to it. NQC, burning bright in the face of
AIDS/HIV, which had dominated gay cultural production in the 1980s, was defiantly
about the moment: presentness, pleasure, aliveness, and even a reclamation-celebration
of a decadent, amoral sexuality that had been sanitised by pious AIDS films
such as Philadelphia.

4:Step Back in TimeBeing of the moment, it was also bound up
with a sense of history, and the danger of that history being erased. Not only
did films such as Jarman’s Edward II or Tom Kalin’s Swoon queer history, but
the movement/moment invoked a queer history running (backwards) from the 1970s
gritty glamour of Warhol’s Factory and the German New Wave to Weimar Berlin –
all of which are referenced in Lisa Cholodenko’s High Art, from its title on. There
was also a serious aspect to the history lessons, with Cheryl Dunye’s The
Watermelon Woman continuing the precursor work of revisioning Black history in
Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust and Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston. Dunye’s
film, though, mixes archival research with hot sex.

5:

Hot Sex! Is another defining factor of the films: not that
they are about sex, or that sex represents a climactic, Sarah
Maclachlan-soundtracked revelation of pure emotion. Sex – good, bad, awkward,
druggy, affectionate, paid, rough, kinky, consensual – is part of the texture
of the characters’ lives and of their dialogue. Swoon, Go Fish and My Own
Private Idaho talk sex, but also use tableaux to stylise the presentation of
sex on screen, verging on experimental video art and influenced equally by
Robert Mapplethorpe and the German filmmakers such as Fassbinder (whose star
Udo Kier is part of the tableaux in My Own Private Idaho), Ulrike Ottinger and
Monika Treut.

6:

Life is a Cabaret! This quoting of New German Cinema often
brings a cabaret-like atmosphere to many NQC films, exemplified in the NQC 2.0
work of John Cameron Mitchell (who was mentored by Gus Van Sant). Hedwig and Shortbus
are both playfully decadent, quoting a riot of high and low art, toying with
camp and irony, with poses and surfaces, to make political points about
cultural history – and show that doing theory can be fun.

7:

Homo Pomo… the phrase coined by Rich to describe the style
of the films she saw in 1992, not only at Sundance, but at the Amsterdam
Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, and at the Toronto Festival of Festivals. So NQC
was of its moment in American indie cinema, too: Amy Taubin compared Swoon,
Haynes’ Poison and Gregg Araki’s The Living End to the stylised violence,
supercharged masculinity and fast and free play with conventional narrative and
morality that defines the postmodernism of early Tarantino.

8:

Camping it UpThis knowing surface of play, which Susan
Sontag had defined as “camp,” had become part of mainstream urban US culture in
the 1980s, characterising music videos, advertising, and the fiction of the
Blank Generation such as Brett Easton Ellis: its presence helped the NQC films
translate from the arthouse festival circuit to theatrical distribution. Queer
culture took it back with a vengeance.

9:

Revolution Girl Style Now! 1992 was also the heyday of riot
grrrl, a zine-fuelled, DIY-band culture steeped in political postmodernism and
discordant guitar music. Mary Timony’s band Helium and other riot grrrl icons
appear on screen in All Over Me (Sichel Sisters), released two years before High
Art and part of a baby-dyke brand of NQC that included Maria Maggenti’s Incredibly
True Adventures of Two Girls in Love: films that seemed to bear out the promise
of Sadie Benning’s Fisher-Price-made videos about affect-deadened, rebellious
girlhood. Benning herself went on to work with Kathleen Hanna of riot grrrl
pioneers Bikini Kill in her later bands Julie Ruin and Le Tigre.

10:

With the Lights Out, It’s
Less Dangerous… It also co-incided with another DIY lo-fi movement emerging
from the Northwestern US: grunge (Nirvana’s Nevermind also marked its 20th
anniversary recently). Although quickly co-opted by mainstream plaid shirt
retailers, grunge initially celebrated independent artistic production as part
of an anti-capitalist ‘slacker’ lifestyle, in which male musicians wore dresses
when they weren’t plaid-clad à la classic West Coast butch

12:

Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out

Characters in NQC films, if
they’re set in the present, often work McJobs (as defined by Douglas Coupland
in Generation X, published in 1991) to support – well, not so much their
artistic careers, as their free time for dating, fucking and talking, rebelling
against the venture capitalism of the 80s. Producer John Pierson called his
memoir of early 1990s cinema Spike, Mike, Slackers and Dykes, and Rose Troche’s
Go Fish shares a talky, slacker attitude – as well as Pierson as producer with –
Kevin Smith’s Clerks. Watermelon Woman’s Cheryl, a video store clerk, could
hold her own on film trivia with Smith’s clerkly lads.

13:

All that Cinema AllowsNQC was an auteur-driven movement
emerging equally from film schools and Sundance, and its films are chock-full
of cinematic references and (ir)reverence, from Kalin’s revisioning of
Hitchcock’s Rope in Swoon to Dunye’s embroidered history of African-American
cinema in Watermelon Woman. It’s cinema that swoons over cinema; even when
lo-fi, it was rich in detailed production design, costume and cinematography,
learning from directors such as Jarman and Sally Potter, whose
NQC-contemporaneous Orlando was nominated for an Oscar for production design,
and is stacked full of references to the high drama and glamour of Powell and
Pressburger.

14:

Without You, I’m Nothing!

But for all that we namedrop the
NQC by its filmmakers, the movement was highly collaborative, and defined as
much by producers such as Pierson and the legendary Christine Vachon, whose
Killer Films has produced all of Todd Haynes and Tom Kalin’s feature films, as
well as Haynes’ HBO series Mildred Pierce – and her company’s title hints at
the amoral glamour her films embrace.

15:

Moore, Moore, Moore! Looking over Haynes’ oeuvre leads me to
Julianne Moore, who appeared in his films Safe, Far From Heaven and I’m Not
There. Her frequent appearance with Haynes at Q&As makes it clear that
she’s a collaborator not, as another Hollywood director infamously called his
actors, a “warm prop.” Her recent role in Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids are All
Right was imbued with her association with NQC, including a leading role in Tom
Kalin’s recent Savage Grace, and as queer or queer-ish characters in van Sant’s
Psycho ’98, and post NQC films such as The Hours, The Big Lebowski, Boogie
Nights (Andersons Paul Thomas and Wes, as well as the Coen Brothers and the
Kaufman/Jonze/Gondry continuum, pick up a lot of their kooky style + dark
humour + revival of melodrama from NQC – Rich picks Being John Malkovich as her
new queer film of 2000), and The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio. Tilda Swinton
carries a similar charge, from her work with Derek Jarman and her breakthrough
role in Potter’s Orlando.

16:

When Good Girls Go Bad:

Both performance and star power,
unsurprisingly for a movement engaged with queer theory (which loves nothing
better than queering a film character through biography, or vice versa) and
high camp, are both crucial to NQC. Films such as My Own Private Idaho and High
Art both take and create pleasure through their cross-casting: teen idols Keanu
Reeves and River Phoenix slumming and bumming it delightfully and knowingly as
hustlers in the former, and former teen stars Ally Sheedy and Radha Mitchell
(who’d appeared in Home and Away) do the same in Cholodenko.

17:

Wear the Ruby Slippers

But the real star of NQC is B. Ruby Rich.
She coined the term “NQC” and promoted it as a programmer and critic on the festival
circuit, and her article “New Queer Cinema” for Sight & Sound (believe it
or not) was definitional. Not only that, but the movement and criticism by
Rich, Amy Taubin, Michele Aaron and others responded to each other. Haynes is
famously alert to feminist film theory, and films such as Watermelon Woman take
pleasure in intellectual debates, critical history and the eroticism of
thinking.

18:

All Good Things Come to an End…

Rich’s and “Queer and
Present Danger” (2000) sounded the death knell for NQC, celebrating the
excellence of High Art and looking critically at Kimberley Peirce’s struggle to
bring Boys Don’t Cry to the screen. Beyond those films, Rich argued, while gay
characters had gone mainstream, queer cinema had become “private,” losing its
political charge and sense of community-building, turned into a style rather
than an activist aesthetic, just as riot grrrl was bought and sold as girl
power.

19:

Other Voices, Other RoomsIn 2005, she suggested that,
moreover, US LGBT cinema (and activism) had become caught up in turbocapitalism
and homonationalism: the right to have a wedding list at Bergdorf’s was
pre-eminent, and Western-capitalist gay culture and rights were to be exported,
by force if necessarily, globally. But as Rich pointed out a “new New Queer
Cinema” was emerging transnationally at arthouse-oriented film festivals, in
the work of directors such as Tsai-Ming Liang, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and
Lucrecia Martel. Their films focus on class, race and national borders crossed
by desire, and tend to define sexuality more fluidly, but are equally cinephiliac
and pleasurable.

20:

Pay it ForwardMartel’s films are co-produced by Pedro
Almodovar, and both van Sant and Haynes have fostered the work of younger
filmmakers (Mitchell and Kelly Reichardt respectively), whose films are
redefining gender and sexuality. Both of them have also returned to queer
themes: van Sant’s Milk deconstructed Hitchcock’s queer killers and US history,
while Haynes’ Mildred Pierce consistently deconstructs what passes for ‘normal’
in the US, turning his eye not only on outlaw culture but, like Todd Solondz,
on the stultifying, pleasure-denying Puritanism of suburbia. In NQC, the
pressure to conform eventually overcomes the power of pleasure found on the
outside, or the excessive pleasure needed to drum out conformism kills: the
classic narrative of melodrama.

Even with – or because of – the tragedy, and always shadowed
by the generational decimation of AIDS/HIV – abandon is the mood of the
original NQC: even as High Art shows the ravages of heroin addiction in a far
more brutal way than the roughly coeval Trainspotting, it also yearns for – and
delivers – the moody textures of Velvet Underground with images you just want
to touch, or melt into. When Mildred loses the all that the narrative of girl
power tells us she should have, and finally gives up her perverse auto-erotic
fixation with her daughter Veda, the only possible response, Haynes’ adaptation
suggests, is a rueful glass of rye and the final line: “Let’s get stinko!”

High art, high drama, high emotions – and partying.
Long may the transgenerational, gender performative, decadent drop-out party
started by NQC continue.